Sounds like you are still confusing the history of a gene or protein with
that of a molecule.  A careful rereading of some of the other great
responses to your question should help to shed some light on this
misunderstanding.  Chlorophyll is a molecule that requires something like 2
dozen proteins to synthesize (the first half or so of these are also used to
synthesize heme, hence the idea that heme is older than chlorophyll).  There
are ideas that the history of these biosynthesis genes should mirror the
history of the molecule (e.g. Morowitz's "metabolism recapitulates
biogenesis"), and some nice but maybe too technical papers attempt to do
exactly this (e.g. Xiong et al. "Complex evolution of photosynthesis" in
Annual Review of Plant Biology 2002, 53:503-21).

"Bartosz Milewski"  wrote in message
news:bvnj9s$2jbs$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> I had no idea hemoglobin was so old. Is there, by any chance, a similar
> paper on the history of the chlorophyll gene?
> Bartosz
>
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